Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains

Todd Presner

Published by Columbia University Press 2007

Mobile Modernity

Germans, Jews, Trains

Todd Presner

In the series Cultures of History

https://doi.org/10.7312/pres14012

Overview
Contents

About this book

Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jews.

Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers.

Turning to philosophy, literature, and the history of technology, and drawing on transnational cultural and diaspora studies, Presner charts the influence of increased mobility on interactions between Germans and Jews. He considers such major figures as Kafka, Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Sebald, Hegel, and Heine, reading poetry next to philosophy, architecture next to literature, and railway maps next to cultural history.

Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity.

Author / Editor information

Todd Samuel Presner is an associate professor of Germanic languages and Jewish studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Criticism, and he has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Reviews

highly successful, oftentimes brilliant, reconstruction of... German/Jewish historical dialectic.

Kevin S. Amidon:
Beautifully crafted... [Presner's] superbly grounded work engages its texts and its readers so well.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
1. Dialectics at a Standstill Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Berlin and Delos Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
3. Sicily, New York City, and the Baranovich Station Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
4. The North Sea Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
5. Nuremberg-Fürth-Palestine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
6. Auschwitz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
7. Vienna-Rome-Prague-Antwerp-Paris Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Concluding Remarks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	347

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 368
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 29
- Other: 29 illus.

eBook

Published: April 19, 2007
ISBN: 9780231511582